Scene on Radio BONUS EPISODE: Pandemic America (Season 4
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Scene on Radio BONUS EPISODE: Pandemic America (Season 4, Episode 6.5) Transcript http://www.sceneonradio.org/bonus-episode-pandemic-america/ [Sound: iPhone Siri tone.] John Biewen: Call Chenjerai. Siri: Calling Chenjerai Koo-muh-nye-ah-ka mobile. [Sound: Phone rings.] Chenjerai Kumanyika: Hey John. John Biewen: Hey Chenjerai. How’s it going in Philadelphia? Chenjerai Kumanyika: Ooh. (Sighs.) It’s challenging. John Biewen: Yeah. You are Chenjerai Kumanyika, I’m John Biewen. We’re the two guys making this season on this podcast. For folks who want to know more, listen to other episodes, where we say more about who we are and what we’re doing. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Right. John Biewen: We’re kind of interrupting Scene on Radio Season 4, with this special coronavirus episode. Tell the people where you are, Chenjerai. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Well, I’m in Philadelphia in my studio upstairs, which is also my office, daycare center, gym, library, place where I cry and panic, things like that. John Biewen: Right. And I am in Durham, North Carolina, in my makeshift studio. I’ve got kind of a pillow fort surrounding me on a desk here in what is also the guest room. Chenjerai Kumanyika: So we are practicing the social distancing thing. But we wanted to make this bonus episode to really cut that distance a little bit and just get in touch with y’all. So I guess what we’re doing is physically distancing but socially podcasting. And I just want to say, there’s a lot of information out there right now about this crisis, including on podcasts… so what we’re NOT going to 1 do is to make a big shift and devote our show like the biology of the virus itself and all this other stuff. John Biewen: Yes, we are not going to become another coronavirus podcast. In fact, we’re hearing from quite a few of you that the story we’re telling about democracy in America, and how it works and doesn’t work for people, feels deeply relevant to what’s happening right now. And we think so, too. So we’re gonna keep on telling that story, we’re gonna continue with The Land That Never Has Been Yet. And we’re lucky to be in a position to do that. We’re able to keep working, and in fact we have a lot of the recordings in hand for several more episodes, what we were planning to do with the series. So we’re gonna just keep building those episodes and putting them out. Chenjerai Kumanyika: And, you know the whole spirit of this series is to really draw the right lessons from history. And so, we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some things we see happening with this covid-19 crisis and how they relate to themes we’ve been talking about in Season 4. And later we also want to talk about actions that all of us can take. John Biewen: Yes. And normally on this show we pretty much focus on our role of telling stories and providing information and analysis. And we’re gonna keep doing that but we feel sensitive to the fact that during a crisis like this, it seems 2 like it’s just not enough to share information, or to express concern for the people who are really being hurt or the people who are putting themselves on the line for the rest of us. We feel the need to be taking some kind of action and to suggest that our listeners do the same, find some way to do something. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah, the thoughts and prayers are good but also not enough. So, stick around, we’ll get to that. But yeah, let’s talk about some ways in which the current crisis really seems to echo the story we’ve been telling in our series on American democracy. And, you know, really going back to the first episodes, we looked at how the most powerful people, the colonial settlers, really saw profit, and keeping the country profitable, as this priority that trumped everything else. And then in our conversation in Episode 2 with Woody Holton, we saw that that focus on profit actually trumped democracy, right? Literally building wealth, at the expense of all kinds of things including people’s lives. John Biewen: Exactly. And remember Woody’s observation that was so key, that the framers of the Constitution believed that in order to maximize capital investment and economic growth, you had to restrain democracy, that capitalist growth and democracy were in conflict or in tension with one another, and you kind of had to choose how much of each of those things you wanted. And then in Episode 3 we saw how that notion played out in the following decades with respect to the vast expansion of the cotton trade and slavery. 3 Chenjerai Kumanyika: And when you look at that, it turns out that yes - it was great for the economy, in the sense that the economy is the same thing as wealthy people’s profits. But it was not great and was in fact oppressive and lethal for enslaved people, Native Americans, and even poor white folks, a lot of poor white folks, who together constituted most of the country. John Biewen: So in those cases from our series, and in others that we’ve looked at, it seems clear that building a healthy economy, as the ownership class understands that, is usually not the same as achieving wellbeing for most people. And here we are today, this argument still seems to be very much with us. Chenjerai Kumanyika: So, you look at what we’re dealing with right now with this crisis, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that this thing of prioritizing profit has a lot to do with why our disaster preparedness is so far from what we need right now. Most of y’all have probably heard that Trump dismantled a pandemic preparedness team inside his administration that had been created during the Obama administration. But what you really have to look at is how he explains his reasoning for this. In a press conference where he was describing why he cut the pandemic team and other things, he said, "I’m a business person….” 4 Donald Trump: Some of the people we’ve cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly. And rather than spending the money, and I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them…. Chenjerai Kumanyika: “I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.” So, there you have it, right? John Biewen: Yeah, so in his businessman’s view, those people on the pandemic team weren’t, I guess, being productive. Chenjerai Kumanyika: And so there’s all these ideas circulating that everything in the world should operate like a business and that somehow businesspeople are the best equipped to do everything. But in this case what you see is that business instinct was incredibly shortsighted. When we've actually known about these kinds of flus for decades, and people have been warning about just this kind of global pandemic -- including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s playing such a prominent role right now. He’s the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and you’ve probably seen him talking about this. He’s been warning about flu pandemics at least since the 1990s. But with that government pandemic unit cut from the budget, the decision of whether or not to develop and 5 mass-produce vaccines and tests was an economic decision left in the hands of people figuring out, like, are we gonna profit from this? John Biewen: And so now here we are in March 2020--and by the way, I think I’ll mention we’re recording on March 26th. I think it’s important to say that because this thing is changing so fast that this is gonna sound outdated in a week or two. But right now the pandemic is in full flower, and the administration is still sidelining and kind of minimizing the role of Dr. Fauci and other public health experts. So, that focus on short-term profits helped to get us into this mess because we weren’t prepared, and then now that we’re in it, it’s still shaping how we respond. So this week, as we’re recording this, there’s a running debate in Washington about when to “re-open” the economy. Some people, including the president, are talking about doing that very soon, while we’re still seeing the virus caseload growing rapidly. Public health experts say, the difference between continuing an aggressive lockdown, making most people stay home in isolation, as opposed to a more half-assed effort that starts to send a lot of people back to work, putting them in contact with other people—the difference could be literally hundreds of thousands more deaths over the coming months. And apparently that’s a trade-off that some people are happy to make. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Right. And while folks are having that debate, what you really have to look at is who has a seat at the table, and who’s positioned to 6 influence the outcome, including these kind of rescue bills and stuff like that.